


Only You

by hylander



Category: SKAM (France)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Eliott is 21, Hurt/Comfort, Lucas is 19, M/M, Other tags to be added later
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-30
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-27 10:37:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20044603
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hylander/pseuds/hylander
Summary: For Lucas, life has always been rather bittersweet, between shitty family situations and crappy self-esteem overall, but his eighteenth birthday marks yet another dramatic turn that no amount of cynicism could have prepared him for.OR. Another soulmates AU.





	1. Prologue (July 2018)

**Author's Note:**

> so i had planned to write it as a long oneshot but apparently i don't remember how to write those 🤦🏻 this one is a teeny tiny prologue but the rest should follow really soon, and in any case i hope you'll forgive me for the wait in-between chapters. As always, thank you so much for reading and feedbacks are always appreciated 🤗💖

It was a strange sting that woke him up that night. Some kind of tingling, maybe a little sharp — like a burn, like his skin was sparkling the way the candies he devoured as a kid would sparkle on his tongue. His slumber wasn’t nearly deep enough for him to be completely disoriented, and he had no trouble to locate where this weird feeling, not all that painful in the end, was coming from: the underside of his right arm, just below the crook of his elbow. 

Lucas immediately bolted upright in his bed, heart thrumming against his ribcage.

It was there.

His soulmate’s name.

He knew it. He just did.

For months now he had read everything he could find on the subject — ever since he and his friends had reached the critical eighteenth birthday, or were just about to. Before that it was the kind of subject that would have them laughing and snorting, because really, _how fucking lame it was_. The idea of soulmates made 13-year-old boys snort and shrug it off, that’s just how it was. But now it was a fucking reality, and ever since Yann had gotten his soulmark, soon followed by Basile, he had been obsessing over it. Objectively he knew everything there was to know about it. He knew that soulmates didn’t automatically equal romantic partners, all websites were adamant about this. He knew that the mark appeared eighteen years after one’s birth, at the exact second, and that their spot on one’s body was the only random thing about it all. He knew that people only had one. He knew some had already died. He knew that some never found theirs.

But if anything it brought up more questions than answers.

First, because he had no idea what the time of his birth was. Smallest problem at hand, probably, but another source of worry nonetheless. His mom was in no place to answer that particular question, and Lucas highly doubted his father would even recall the day at all if it weren’t for his annual alarm on his phone.

Second, because he was gay. Which in itself wasn’t a problem — the prospect of having some girl’s name carved in his skin was. A few close friends of his were girls, it wasn’t like being attached at the hip with either another one _or_ one of them sounded that bad, but he was terrified by the idea of him not being romantically involved with his soulmate. Some people found it better, simpler, easier to manage — but Lucas wasn’t one of them. He had never had a proper first love and he longed for someone who would be there for him when he craved it the most. Sue him, but he wanted to be loved, unconditionally and unapologetically. He knew this type of love could be platonic, but he just couldn’t bring himself to stop fantasizing about it. It scared him senseless. The exact reason why his heartbeat was currently through the roof.

His eyes snapped to the clock on his nightstand. 4:05AM. Maybe he should call Yann. He, Arthur and Basile had been talking with him long after the clock hit midnight and they had (figuratively) yelled him birthday wishes through big-cap texts, but they were all probably asleep by now. Maybe he could just get up and go to Mika’s room — wait no, he was working a night shift. Lucas racked his brain but it was to no avail. Manon was in vacation and going to Lisa was surely the best way for him to get headbutted.

_You got this_, he encouraged himself. _It’s fine_. _Let’s just get this over with._

His stomach in knots, he blindly reached for his phone and turned up the flashlight. His arm kept tingling, almost insistently, and Lucas swallowed thickly as he looked up at the ceiling lost in the depths of the night, finding himself praying to some God he didn’t even believe in in the first place. It was pathetic. Everyone who knew him would probably be dumbfounded to find him in this state — but here and now, it was just him. Him and a soulmark carving itself under his skin, a soulmark he was too afraid to even peer at. _Whatever the name on your body is, no matter that you ultimately find your soulmate or not, it doesn’t decrease your value as a person_, someone had written on a thread he had read once, an advice he had never clung to with so much despair than he was now.

“I’m still me,” Lucas whispered to himself, and with a final inspiration that resembled a dying breath, he set his arm under the light of the flashlight, turning it so that the underside was exposed.

There indeed was a name written there, the skin red around the black letters as if he had just walked out of a tattoo parlor.

A name.

A boy name.

“Eliott,” Lucas whispered, immediately biting onto his bottom lip.

It rolled on his tongue, sweet and smooth, and after repeating it a couple more times, it felt like that name in particular had been there throughout his life. Lucas found himself repeating it a few more times during the night, long after he had shut down the flashlight. Some type of giddiness was bubbling in the pit of his stomach, and his thumb kept mechanically rubbing the name on his skin until he finally started dozing off a little while later. Somewhere on this fucking planet, someone was made just for him, _designated_ just for him, and this thought, however simple, made everything look a little brighter. And lot more bearable. It wasn’t so often that he got to be so stupidly excited over something, but he knew himself well enough by now to know that another reason to worry would come around soon enough — finally finding his soulmate, for instance, now that he had one.

In that moment, he decided as he fell asleep, he could just roll with being happy.


	2. February 2019

_Scrap, scrap, scrap. _

The pencil was grazing the paper sheet with so much precision and regularity that Lucas had no trouble supplying the missing sound of the lead. His eyes were focused on the hands of the customer sitting outside, only tearing away when the guy set the pencil down to roll himself a cigarette. Of course he was a smoker. February had been relatively lenient so far, but it was a bit too early in the year to spend more time outside than necessary, unless you were a smoker. He didn’t know how long he had been looking, but a lifetime of noisy canteen tables had given him the ability to tune his loud friends out whenever he wanted to — perhaps too effectively, because now he had three pairs of eyes on him.

He was forced to refocus his attention on his own table, tearing his eyes away from the street. Last time he had tried to find interest in the conversation, it had been about some party the guys wanted to go, since apparently Arthur had game with a friend of Marine’s, his platonic soulmate. Nothing that called for his contribution, from what he knew, but maybe he had missed the part where it got interesting. 

“What?”, he asked blankly.

“He’s hot,” Yann simply commented with an approving nod.

Lucas followed his gesture, directed towards the guy sitting outside.

“_Super_ hot,” Basile confirmed, pausing from slaughtering a viennoiserie to spare a glance.

“I was looking at the drawings,” Lucas said, eyes falling onto his now lucky-warm cup of coffee.

“So you can actually _see_ anything from here?” Arthur deadpanned.

Lucas’ eyes travelled between the three of them, but the insistence they had to look outside made him turn back one more time. It was the worst idea he probably ever had. Because yes, the guy was beautiful, but he was also staring right the fuck back at him from the other side of the glass. Lucas was sure he could feel his eyes burning holes into his skin — not in a _bad _way, but in a totally, a 100% fucked up way.

Lucas’ head snapped back the other way, so fast he nearly broke his neck in the process. _Smooth, Lallemant, real smooth, _he thought sarcastically.

“He’s looking at you,” Basile remarked unhelpfully and far, _far _too eagerly to Lucas’ taste.

“No he’s not,” he gritted out, scowling. “He’s looking at _us_, because you are fucking creeps. Stop staring!”

“Says the one who was staring first,” Arthur snorted. “Bro, you weren’t even blinking.”

“I was looking at _the drawings_,” Lucas hammered, whisper-screaming. “Can we just collectively ignore him now and drop the subject?”

It could have come in handy for him to know what the conversation was about before it came to this, maybe he would have had higher chances to redirect it on safer grounds, but as it was what were the odds that they had changed subject since the last time he tried to care?

Yann quirked a brow, apparently far from being done. “So you’d just pass on him?”

“I’m not passing on anything, he’s just a _guy_,” Lucas retorted.

“Right,” Arthur drawled, extending the ‘i’ obnoxiously. “Just a guy. Staring the fuck at you. Plus, our love lives are a lot less miserable than yours.”

“I just got out of a relationship, I’ll let you know,” Basile retorted haughtily.

“And I’m not interested in dating these days,” Yann shrugged.

“Then why can’t you just understand that I’m not interested _either_?” Lucas huffed, ignoring Basile’s intervention to focus on Yann.

He profoundly hated the sudden tone of the conversation, all too aware where this was going. He wished he was wrong, but as soon as Yann sighed and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the table, Lucas knew it wasn’t the case.

“Because it’s about your _soulmate_,” he said, “not about you not wanting to date.”

“It always is,” Arthur quipped in his cup of coffee.

Lucas’ stomach tightened, and he instinctively averted his eyes.

Today had been an empty day. Not bad, not good. Just empty, an hour carrying him here and the other carrying there. It wasn’t all that bad, it was even days like these that Lucas craved the most — those where he was just feeling numb enough not to care. Of course now it was a lot more difficult _not_ to care when his three (supposedly) best friends had decided to meddle in, especially when he had asked them not to.

“Look, we just don’t want you to keep moping forever,” Basile added.

Arthur nodded, shifting towards Lucas who was sitting next to him. “He’s right. When a cute guy looks at you, you just go for it, that’s how it works,” he completed with a casual shrug.

“Yeah, just go talk to him.”

“I’m _not_ going to do that,” Lucas retorted coolly, feeling his calm crumble with each passing second. “I’m not going to talk to a guy who looked at the _four of us_ once, and I certainly don’t need your fucked up advices because you’ve got no idea what I’m going through!”

“Because you never let anything out,” Yann protested.

“Why should I?” Lucas exclaimed. “So you can tell me to forget about it and just move on?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Basile admitted, looking rather embarrassed, and Lucas’ eyes jumped on him. “It’s been what, five months, now? Maybe- Maybe that’s what you should do?”

Arthur and Yann both glanced at him, mouthing a quiet ‘_dude’_ with a shake of their head. Lucas opened his mouth and closed it, nothing coming out at first. “How about _you _start shutting up about your damn soulmate, Baz?”, he snapped. “’When am I going to meet her’, ‘what does she look like’, ‘what if I never see her’-”

“Lucas–,” Arthur tried, but Lucas snatched his arm away when he squeezed it lightly to distract him.

“No, I’m fucking done hearing you all complain,” Lucas protested, perhaps louder than he should have judging by the embarrassed looks of the guys. He shook his head and stood up abruptly, grabbing his backpack and making the cups on the table tinkle together. “‘Oh no, my soulmate’s Emma’, ‘oh no my soulmate’s a platonic one’, ‘oh when am I gonna find her’, but mine is _fucking dead_, so excuse me for making a big deal out of it!”, he exclaimed bitterly, throwing the last words behind his shoulder as he was already on his way out.

*

4 months and a half, 21 hours and 36 minutes.

138 days. Over 3334 hours.

That’s how long he had been miserable. Ever since that horrible evening, last October. He and the boys were having predrinks at the flatshare, before hitting a college party organized by PACES students, and the memory of his own laughter made it all the more painful in retrospect. They were not quite a month into their first year at uni, and Lucas was still buzzing with the excitement of it all. In complete honesty he couldn’t have cared less about his studies; the major he had picked after his BAC, economics, was far from being his thing, but the silver lining had been his soulmate. As Yann had pointed out to him shortly after getting his soulmark last summer, new faces all around at uni meant more chances to meet his ‘Eliott guy’. And Lucas? Well, Lucas couldn’t decently argue with that logic, really. Every new party was another occasion to casually hope for something to happen — he had just never thought that ‘something’ happening would be so fucking painful.

“What are you looking at?” he remembered laughing in-between two rounds of video games and his second beer, after spotting Arthur’s eyes on him for quite some time now.

Arthur had barely looked up, frowning behind his glasses instead. “Dude, I think… I think your soulmark’s fading.”

Lucas had glanced down at his arm, exposed by the tee-shirt he was wearing, heartbeat rising as he jumped up from the couch to the closest source of light in the room to get a better view. A rush of adrenaline after that, and Lucas’ brain a mess of emotions making his head spin. He remembered clutching at his own arm, as he could do nothing but stare at the six letter name growing fainter and fainter despite his pleas, until it was barely noticeable at all and that the guys had no more comforting things to come up with. No one went to the party that night. Instead, Lucas found himself cradling his arm most of the night, hoping and begging for it to be just a mistake. For Eliott’s name to come back, thick and black and bold letters all over again — but it never did. His soulmark had remained the same, a faint scar in the shape of a name.

He hadn’t sought other testimonies online this time. He hadn’t felt the need to. Soulmarks fading was about a soulmate dying, everybody knew that. He didn’t need people recounting tearful stories, nor did he need anyone to instill hope where it had no place to be. Whoever Eliott was, whoever he had once been, it was over for him — for them. It had been terrible from there, and he wasn’t going to pretend otherwise just to make his friends feel better about it. They were still at an age where these kind of things were a big deal, for better or for worse, and he knew he’d still be looking out for Eliott everywhere he went just like Basile did with his soulmate, if it weren’t for a fucked up destiny taking too much pride in screwing him over.

“Excuse me?” tentatively called a voice next to him.

“What?” Lucas answered sharply, head snapping to the side.

The scowl on his face turned into a sarcastic twist of his lips accompanied by a dry snort. Of fucking course. The artsy customer from the café was standing here, roughly two meters away from him. There was only _one_ fucking reason he’d be here, and this fucking reason in particular was a three-headed dumbass he had known since high school and was now dying to throw under the next bus.

“They are assholes, alright?” he spat. “I don’t know what they fucking told you and I don’t fucking care. I’m not interested, period.”

“You’re not interested,” the guy repeated, slightly cocking an eyebrow. Lucas thought he was on the verge of exploding if he was so much as trying to insist. But instead, the guy reached for a rolled-up cigarette he had tucked behind his ear. “I was just gonna ask for a lighter, but it’s always nice to know where everybody stands I guess.”

He was _smiling_.

Lucas’ cheeks heated up from crushing embarrassment and he cast his eyes away, staring at his hands and deflating instantly. It was definitely not the worst day of his life, but he could feel it make a solid entry in the top 5.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m not smoking.”

The guy shrugged. “Alright.”

_Please, leave_. He was the only one beside him waiting at the bus stop, if he really needed a lighter it wouldn’t magically appear in Lucas’ pocket. _Just leave_. Fighting with the guys had sucked the last bit of energy he had left in his body, he didn’t have any more left. But instead the guy sat on the metallic bench. Ultimate fuckery if there was one. He didn’t have any idea what he had done in a past life, but he could only guess it was bad. Lucas tried to look away and absorb himself in the silent contemplation of the sidewalk, but all he could think about was that he wanted to come home and crawl under the covers and forget that day even happened at all. It wasn’t easy when the guy sitting next to him was a constant reminder of the shitty afternoon he had just spent, between boring classes he didn’t give a fuck about, friends who had forgotten the basic meaning of ‘supportive’ and, of course, last but not least, lashing out to a complete stranger for trying to hit on him and who happened to be so far out of his league that they didn’t even play the same sport.

A metallic flick drove his attention toward the lighter the guy was currently trying to make work, with a concentrated frown on his face and the cigarette now tucked between his lips. He kept flicking, once, twice, ten times, until Lucas couldn’t take it anymore.

“Usually when they don’t work the first five times, they rarely work the ten other times after that,” he said.

The guy glanced at him, then shrugged. “I guess I’m a dreamer then, uh?”

He put the cigarette back behind his ear and pocketed the uncooperative lighter in his brown jacket. Lucas took his eyes away and glanced at the other end of their street, where his bus was slowly (but hopefully steadily) making its way in their direction.

“Rough day?”

Lucas risked an eye in the guy’s direction. “You don’t have to do that, you know. It’s fine.”

He shrugged one more time. “I don’t mind,” he said, smiling a little even.

_Is he fucking kidding me_? Lucas thought instantly, taken aback. He found himself staring, blatantly, unapologetically, as if he was seeing him for the first time. He studied his insanely intense grey eyes, and the messy but effortlessly good-looking brown hair making wonders to his sharp cheekbones. _He’s_ _hot_, he was forced to admit to himself, just when the bus reached their stop in a concert of screeching and hissing sounds. But somehow, his inner voice suddenly sounded a lot like Yann’s, and it made him angry.

Angry and upset and fucking outraged.

“Well, I do mind,” he articulated.

Before the guy could even say something, Lucas snatched his backpack from the bench and strode towards the entrance of his bus without a glance back.


End file.
